West's Grazing Act Is Not a `Subsidy'

West's Grazing Act Is Not a `Subsidy'

Article excerpt

The article "Old Ranch Traditions Blend With New Values," Oct.
25, was a welcome balance to the generally bad press that ranchers
get in the East. But it still left the false impression that
responsible range management is the exception among Western
ranchers; and it referred to "subsidized" federal land as if
that's the only kind there could be.

Kansas belongs to Kansans because the Homestead Act gave
settlers in the Great Plains clear title to their farms. By 1875,
the director of the General Land Office was reporting that the
Homestead Act worked for crop lands, but not for arid range lands.
In 1934, after a half century of attempts to accomplish in the West
what the Homestead Act had done in the Midwest, Congress passed the
Taylor Grazing Act, creating the present grazing permits. President
Roosevelt's director of grazing told the stockmen that the policy
was "to give {your lands} the adjunctive pasture rights which
naturally belong to them."

Grazing rights acquired under the Taylor Act are no more a
subsidy than are land titles acquired under the Homestead Act. The
rural population of basin-and-range America are not sharecroppers;
permit fees are not rents; and the rest of us are not absentee
landlords.

Ranchers could devise conservation plans with their neighbors,
but before the Taylor Act, drovers who had no investment in any
land would buy herds and move them around on the public domain with
no regard to local plans. To stop this practice, the Grazing
Service attached "the permit to the land."

In 1946 the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was born. Grazing
schedules on public land are now set not by the rancher, but by the
BLM apparatus that has perpetuated the simplistic and ruinous
"graze half, leave half" policy that ranchers, county agents, and
range scientists have been trying for years to replace with
intelligently structured practices like the ones the article
describes. If grazing fees do not cover all of the costs of that
apparatus, who is being subsidized?
Malcolm Whatley, Burlington, Vt.
Private diaries?

I would like to comment on the editorial "Packwood and
Privacy," Oct. …